UC San Diego

Before the Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion, the 21st-century anti-choice movement was focused on establishing informed consent statutes as a means to discourage or prevent abortions. Often titled “A Woman’s Right to Know,” these laws require that patients are warned of alleged risks of breast cancer, infertility, and psychological trauma following abortions. In some states, patients must undergo an ultrasound and wait at least 24-hours before receiving an abortion. These statutes have been shown to delay or hinder care.This dissertation is a genealogy of these informational requirements. I analyze how Roe v. Wade (1973) and ensuing abortion jurisprudence in the 1970s enshrined the abortion right in a medicalized framework of abortion access. This framing eschewed feminists’ requests that women be solely responsible for deciding when and why to undergo an abortion. Instead, the Court articulated a qualified first-trimester privacy right in which pregnant women were tasked with making a responsible abortion decision in consultation with their physician. Through historical and legislative analysis, this dissertation traces how the medicalized right to abortion enabled the later development of informed consent statutes. The informed consent doctrine ideally seeks to protect patient autonomy from medical paternalism. But the noun “patient” acts as a qualifier that configures someone’s autonomy and available choices according to their status as a patient. The doctrine was thus an ideal vehicle for anti-choice efforts to implement restrictions meant to protect abortion patients. It enabled statutes that nominally promoted pregnant women’s autonomy, while infusing informational requirements with religious views of well-being that confused motherhood with health. I argue that the discourse of “abortion regret”, which produced motherhood as the rational, retroactive, even if foregone choice, legitimized these informational requirements. From Roe onwards, pregnant people were tasked with making responsible abortion decisions in light of their health. Throughout the decades, however, 1) how “women’s health” was conceptualized and 2) whether physicians or the State were the rightful shepherds of the abortion decision became battlegrounds for pro- and anti-choice organizing.